The Animal Issue 2018
Carrying on the Ox-Pulling Tradition; Raising Bees in the Backyard; 50+ Years Teaching Animal Science; Celebrating Franklin County’s Dairy Heritage
Lounging in the Library
Does your family have a checklist of places you like to visit when school’s out? A favorite beach? A beloved creemee stand? If it’s not on your agenda already, consider adding your local library. Summer is a great time for families who don’t regularly visit their library to stop in and see what it has…
How Can a Therapy Dog Help When Counseling Children and Teens?
Studies have shown that dogs improve people’s health in numerous ways. They can lower anxiety and stress levels, provide a reason to exercise, expand our social interactions, and increase our overall sense of happiness, purpose and wellbeing. Counselor Megan Holleran harnesses those benefits in her work with preteens and adolescents. A licensed clinical mental health…
Destination Recreation: Purple Sage’s Salt Cave
Between annoying cartoons and crowded museums, kids’ entertainment can feel like sensory overload. The salt cave at Purple Sage, a salon and spa in Essex Junction, offers a relaxing antidote to overstimulation. Located in the Essex Shoppes, Purple Sage offers a range of holistic, healing, spa and beauty services. The cornerstone of its holistic healing…
Dairy for Days: A Slice of Life at Enosburg Falls’ Cow-Focused Festival
Milking a cow is harder than it looks. That was one of our takeaways from the 62nd annual Vermont Dairy Festival, which took place in Enosburg Falls in early June. The three-day fest included a kids’ milking contest, in which contestants squeezed the udders of a life-size plastic cow by hand. The kids we talked…
Habitat: Backyard Beehives
On a muggy night in July 2015, Eric Howe pushed two hives of swarming honeybees into the trunk of his Subaru and drove two and a half miles from his family’s old house to their new home in Williston. The hot, stuffy conditions were miserable for this sort of maneuver, and the bees tried to…
Path to Freedom
The Bhattarai family’s journey from a refugee camp in Nepal to their home in Winooski is chronicled in words and photographs in A New American Family, an exhibit hosted by the Winooski Peace Initiative at the O’Brien Community Center. It tells the story of Prem and Mana Bhattarai; their four children; their granddaughter Blossom; and…
Lyme on the Rise
Vermont may have nudged out Maine to become the state with the highest incidence of Lyme disease. Preliminary data show 1,091 cases reported to the Vermont Department of Health in 2017, up from 763 in 2016, when Vermont ranked second in the country for cases per capita. Actual numbers are likely much higher; the Centers…
Healthy Habits
As a dietitian for the Hannaford supermarket chain, Joanne Heidkamp spends the bulk of her days prepping and serving samples of healthy snacks and helping shoppers in the Essex, South Burlington and Williston stores make nutritious and cost-effective decisions in the aisles. Another facet of her work is leading classes designed to teach kids and…
Ahead of the Herd: A Young Teamster Masters an Old New England Tradition
Name: Jacob Stone Age: 12 Town: Barnard Drivers on Vermont Route 12 just south of the Barnard-Bethel town line slow down and sometimes stop at the sight of a slim boy in a baseball cap leading a pair of 600-pound steers, yoked, harnessed and pulling a giant tire up and down his gravel driveway. Five…
Parent Portrait: Sarah, Ewan & Norah
Tell us about your pets! In what order did they arrive? Sarah: Well, Fuzzy the cat was first. When we moved back to Vermont from Montana (when the kids were young), I wanted an exact replica of my childhood cat, a white Maine Coon from the hills of Rutland. So I searched Craigslist and rescues…
Get Dog, Lose Dog: How Fostering a Puppy Gave a Boost to Our Family
Through the years, my kids periodically asked my husband, Jeff, and I for a dog. It seemed like everyone we knew had one. As Mira and Theo got older, the prospect of having a furry companion seemed increasingly appealing. A pup would give 8-year-old Theo something to do when he was bored, we thought. It…
Animals All Around
Growing up in the suburbs of New York City, I didn’t have many opportunities to interact with barnyard animals. Seeing a goat or sheep was a novelty; it usually meant a one-off trip to a petting zoo or local farm. My Vermont-born kids, on the other hand, have almost daily encounters with animals. Though we…
The Art of… Turtle Care
With their leathery, pliant shells, Eastern spiny softshell turtles — the only species of softshell turtles found in New England — are especially vulnerable to predators. Since 1987, they’ve been listed as a threatened species in Vermont. A partnership between the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department and ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain aims to…
Are your kids bored? Good.
Summer is wonderful in many ways. For one, it’s not zero degrees and blackout dark for 22 hours a day. Berries grow, creemee stands open, flowers bloom. But, let’s get real, summer can also be high-pressure and high-stress for parents. For those nine-ish weeks of summer vacation, we have to figure out how to juggle…
Cows and Classwork: An Animal Science Teacher Reflects on a Half Century of Educating Kids
A gallon of gas sold for 30 cents, a stamp cost a nickel and Vermont had 9,247 farms in 1964, when James Messier began teaching as the sole agricultural instructor at Highgate Elementary and High School. Much has changed in Vermont agriculture since then — the number of farms has dropped to 7,300 — but…
